Drilling & refinery automation
Robotic drill-floor handling and autonomous inspection for upstream rigs and downstream refineries — getting crews out of the red zone and off rope access.
- Upstream
- Robotic pipe & tubular handling
- Downstream
- Autonomous inspection rounds
What this covers
Oil and gas sites concentrate the work Physical AI is best suited to remove: heavy, repetitive tasks in the "red zone" where slippery mud and moving pipe cause injuries, and inspection work that puts people at height or in confined spaces.
Upstream — the drill floor
- Robotic pipe handling — moving tubulars from horizontal to vertical, racking, and stand building.
- Iron roughneck automation — making and breaking high-torque connections under full parameter control.
- Tripping, casing and completion handling — repetitive connection cycles run by the machine, supervised from a cabin.
- Remotely operated rigs — pulling crew off the floor entirely for the highest-risk sequences.
Downstream — refineries, tanks and pipelines
- Autonomous operator rounds — legged and wheeled robots reading gauges, sniffing for gas, and running thermal and acoustic checks on a fixed schedule.
- Robotic inspection — magnetic crawlers and drones for tank shells, pressure vessels, flare stacks and pipe racks, replacing rope access and scaffolding.
- Data back to the maintenance system — every round logged, trended, and flagged.
How we work
- Site and task survey. Which stations carry the risk, what the connection and inspection cycles look like, connectivity, and the regulatory picture.
- Retrofit or integrate. Handling robots and control for the drill floor; perception, autonomy and docking for inspection robots.
- Supervised operation. The machine runs the cycle; one operator supervises from a safe cabin or control room.
- Operate and hand over. Monitoring, exclusion zoning, audit logs, and a maintenance plan.
What you get
Fewer people in the red zone and off rope access, inspection on a dependable schedule instead of a shutdown scramble, and a maintenance record that builds itself.
Common questions
Do you automate the whole rig?
We work station by station. The drill floor — iron roughneck connections, tubular handling, tripping — is where the injury risk and the automation payback are highest, so it is usually first.
What does autonomous inspection replace?
Routine operator rounds and much of the rope-access and scaffold inspection on tanks, vessels, flare stacks and pipe racks — gauge reading, gas detection, thermal and acoustic surveys done on a schedule by a robot instead of a person at height or in a confined space.
Is this for offshore or onshore?
Both. The drill-floor and inspection work applies to onshore rigs, refineries and tank farms today; offshore deployments carry additional certification we scope from the first survey.